Too bad he's not state side because shipping to me would be prohibitively expensive. I would pick up a few tens of kilos. I think we paid like $6/lb
for 98% Ca last time and it wasn't nearly as nice as what he has. We occasionally have projects where we need to convert rare earth halides to the
metal.
BTW, I've done the Cs from CsCl with Ca. It works for Rb as well. Very nicely. You can then redistill the metals in vacuo.
I have a ton of left over CsCl...some 2 or 3 kilograms' worth so if you want any let me know. Some of it I use for things at work (i.e. Cs2IrCl6) but
I've been getting the hankering to dig out some stainless pipe and have one of my colleagues that knows how to TIG weld it up. |